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First time accepted submitter EponymousCustard writes "On a day of big resignations, we also hear that Troy Dawson of the Scientific Linux project is joining Red Hat, and will no longer be working on Scientific Linux. It will be a big loss. thanks to Troy for all the great work!"

Fermilab is not shutting down. The tevatron is but Fermi is actively participating in the CMS detector at the LHC and has a few projects looking at neutrino physics and other things in the intensity frontier.

Troy isn't the main SL developer, he is one of two main developers. SL's original developer is still there, and it's pretty likely Fermilab will find a potential replacement for Troy from their pool of Linux talent.

Troy isn't the main SL developer, he is one of two main developers. SL's original developer is still there, and it's pretty likely Fermilab will find a potential replacement for Troy from their pool of Linux talent.

As a SL desktop user, I hope this doesn't negatively affect SL. But, I hope Troy and Red Hat do well together.

Well, Fermilab still has a large number of SL machines, and will continue to have, and support, a large number of SL machines. We will continue to need some kind of supported linux for scientific applications. Whilst in principle the lab and user community could migrate to something else instead of producing SL6, SL7 and so on, it seems unlikely that an alternative would involve less work.

Well, the difference between Arch and SL is that SL sucks. (e.g. System V overcomplexity all up in your init scripts, patches things too much, obsolete package versions, package manager that isn't the one I like.) All the sort of suckage that makes a typical enterprise OS unsuitable for my home PC.

Or is that not what you meant?

(And if anyone infers I don't understand the converse unsuitability of Arch for a typical enterprise deployment, thanks for projecting, we now know how

SL is based on, and closely tracks, Redhat's Enterprise Linux product, which has been designed to offer stability and very long support periods (at least 7 years after release I think). That's what makes it suitable for servers, whereas most other* Linux distro's have shorter release and support cycles (12-18 months) and tend to use more recent versions of software, which makes them arguably more unstable.

* Note there are other 'enterprise ready' long-support cycle distros such as Debian Stable, or Suse Lin

If you are down that SL Linux has hit this roadblock, check out PUIAS...
http://puias.math.ias.edu/ [ias.edu]
I found it not too long ago, has Princeton University backing, and is extremely mature...
I switched the moment I found it. SL and CentOS are not the only RH clones in the world.

Hi,
I have loved all the years that I have been a developer and architect
for Scientific Linux, but it is time for me to move on. I have accepted
a job offer from Red Hat to work on their new openshift project.
( https://www.redhat.com/openshift/ [redhat.com] )
My last day working for Fermilab, and on the Scientific Linux project
will be September 2, 2011.

Thank you to everyone who has encouraged, thanked, and helped me over
the past 8 years that I have worked on Scientific Linux. I have said it
before, and I'll say it now, The Scientific Linux community is one of
the best communities there is.